Alfred Werner Quotes

The chemist, whose science is immediately concerned with the combinations of atoms, has rarely found it necessary to discuss their shapes, and gives them no particular forms in his diagrams. That does not mean that the shapes are unimportant, but rather that the older methods could not define them.

The atoms may be compared to the letters of the alphabet, which can be put together into innumerable ways to form words. So the atoms are combined in equal variety to form what are called molecules.

Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.

Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.

The most common and most important result of them is that the nature and size of the effect on corresponding series of different elements are largely an expression of the peculiarity of their atomic structure - or, at least, of the structure of the surface.

The infinite variety in the properties of the solid materials we find in the world is really the expression of the infinite variety of the ways in which the atoms and molecules can be tied together, and of the strength of those ties.

Much of my work in biology has been driven by my early training in chemistry. When studying a new chemical compound, the first and most important thing is to determine its detailed molecular structure.

There's nothing colder than chemistry.

Molecular chemistry, the chemistry of the covalent bond, is concerned with uncovering and mastering the rules that govern the structures, properties and transformations of molecular species.

Organic compounds exist in which a hydrogen atom, joined to the carbon, acquires acid properties as a result of the proximity of certain functional groupings.

Molecules A and B meet, marry, and beget the species. This takes place in one-millionth of a billionth of a second. This is a fundamental process in nature, and the world was looking for a way to be able to see the process. But many brilliant people said it couldn't be done.

This simple idea served to provide information on the geometrical shape of reacting molecules, and I was able to make the role of the frontier orbitals in chemical reactions more distinct through visualization, by drawing their diagrams.

The discovery of various phenomena has led to a recognition of the fact that the chemical atom is an individual which again is itself made up of several units into a selfcontained whole.

With this in mind, for some twenty years I have set myself as my particular task the experimental investigation of the connexion between change in the structure and change in the spectra of chemical atoms.

About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.

I started my scientific work by putting forward a hypothesis on the arrangement of atoms in nitrogen-containing molecules.

If you had to sum up chemistry in one sentence, it might be this: Atoms need to have full shells of electrons to feel satisfied, and different elements steal, shed, or borrow different numbers of electrons to achieve a full shell.

The essential principles of the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules had been correctly formulated by the first Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Jacobus van't Hoff, as early as 1874.

The main thread of my work is structure property relations and materials. If you have certain atoms, why do they attract each other? Why do they make compounds? Why do they do what they do?

During the course of my research, I had had occasion to examine not only simple compounds, salts and oxides, but also a great number of minerals.

The problem is how do molecules react. Because if you want to transform a molecule into something useful or something you're interested in, it helps a lot to understand the structure. That means you can explore much more complicated systems, much more complicated reactions.

Chemistry is the science of atoms. Elaborating on Democritus' idea, chemists learn how atoms stick or don't stick together, thus forming molecules.

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company. I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule? I tell them, Try to feel like a molecule; and if you work hard, who knows? Some day you may get to feel like a big molecule!